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English

If I wrote a book, would you read it?

Hello reader. I’ve been playing with an idea in my mind. I’d love to help more people overcome procrastination. Some I can reach from here, and that’s awesome, and I’d would love your help there, If you think this site deserves it, please share it with your friends. Now, I’d like to put this help in ebook format, what do you think? If I wrote that book, would you read it? Would you find the information valuable enough  to part with some of your hard earned dollars to get it?  Please let me know in the comments, thank you!

Categories
Actionable English Mindset Procrastination

Resistance

I’m not going to talk about Valentine’s day.

I am doing this even though I don’t really feel like it today. You know the feeling. Sometimes your head wants to be in another place. You can’t seem to find the drive that just yesterday you had to accomplish something. You start having doubts again “Is this worth it?” “Am I good enough?” “Am I the real deal?” It’s a real emotional see saw, am I right? All of this happens to all of us, if it doesn’t happen to you you might be a psychopath, but that’s another story. OK, we all feel this, but what is it then? Glad you asked. This feelings, even though they are not equal, can be bundled in the same space. You can see they’re not equal because the “Am I good enough?” feeling is from someone who is yet to make his mark, but the “Am I the real deal?”, technically called “impostor syndrome”, comes from someone who is already crushing it yet she fears she will be seen for what she is, to her doubting self, a fraud. All this comes from one simple force, Resistance.

“Resistance: the attempt to prevent something by action or argument.” Resistance is a force of nature, of human nature. It’s always there, when we are awake, when we sleep, when we feel cheerful, when we feel gloomy, when we are “in the zone” or when we are “in a rut”, Resistance is always there. We might think we’ve beaten it, but we haven’t. The same way the eagle doesn’t defeat waterfall-984180_960_720gravity when it soars through the sky, because it will have to face it again after sleeping and needing to hunt for another meal. And that is a good thing. It’s a good thing because fighting Resistance is what builds us up. We lift weights in a gym because they cause resistance to our movement and we build muscle from that. We memorize, and have some trouble doing it, because we want to be able to access information later on, and use it, but there is resistance in the memorization process, at least for me.

 

Resistance is. Resistance will always be there. And it’s relentless. And, as Steven Pressfield said “Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill.” Resistance seems to want things to stay the same, but in reality, we know things can’t stay the same, ever. Resistance then wants us to stop moving, to prevent us from provoking that change and produce something. Resistance wants to let things rot. We want to help things live. We want to create. We want to help others create. We want to fight Resistance on every opportunity we get. We fight Resistance every time we decide to write another word, brush another line, talk with one more person, send one more business email, review one more expense report. We fight Resistance all the time we move forward on our creative space. And that’s all there is to it, with Resistance. We only need to know that it’ll never, ever, go away. It will always be there to hold us back. And that is good to know. It’s good to know because we can count on it as we can count on gravity. We can use it to make us go forward. We can use it to make us stronger. We can use it to produce better work everyday. We can use it to force us to stop procrastinating. What? You thought I wouldn’t be able to make a reference to procrastination? It was implied all this time and only in the end did I allow it to show it’s head here.

When you go on this morning, minding your own business, and you feel Resistance, I hope you’re able to recognize it. When you do, first thing before fighting it I want you to recognize it. I want you to see it curiously, and acknowledge it’s existence and power. Then you fight it. You’ll find this way is clearer, you will have more options and you’ll be more successful. Tell us how Resistance has been trying to get you? We’d all love to read it down here in the comments.

Categories
English Growth Money Procrastination

“Second hand procrastination” is it a thing?

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A few weeks back, in my post titled “What kind of procrastinator are you?” we talked about the different kinds of procrastinators. I want to revisit and expand on the ones that have the “student’s syndrome”. We’ve seen how they leave until the last possible moment their tasks, and then rush on to do them, their bodies full of adrenaline, cortisol, from within, and from the outside they might use stimulants such as caffeine, taurine or even others even more intense substances. In the future I will refer to this type of procrastinator as “The Rusher”, because, he rushes to get his job done, sometimes even regardless of the consequences.

The Rusher goes to extremes to get the things done at the last possible moment, just when the pressure, exhilaration and anxiety surpass his content and calm brought by doing something else. Now, this would be the end of the conversation if not for the fact that, more often than not, this rush brings unwanted results. As he sprints to the finish line The Rusher might want to cut some corners, maybe not on the job he’s doing if he’s got high standards, but on the other aspects of his personal and professional lives.

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The Rusher, is by his procrastination a risk taker, as he won’t be taking into account that Murphy may break havoc with his plans of finishing the task. That’s when an unexpected outage in the Internet, an empty printer cartridge, a late delivery all become life or death emergencies that have to be handled at any cost. The procrastinator suddenly starts asking for favors left and right, and his relationships might suffer from this or he might end up indebted much more for this help for much more than the value of the favor entitled in other more normal situations. Also our Rusher might, for example, neglect his commitments to other people or other projects, stressing unwittingly those relationships. All of this without the need of there being an extra setback on the task at hand. The simple fact of having to set everything aside because all available time, every ounce of energy, all of the attention have to be concentrated on the task can cause problems with others. A commitment previously engaged, could be even previous to the assignment or existence of the task, might have to be canceled because it’s priority suddenly drops, as the task’s rises. That commitment is now a casualty of The Rusher’s procrastination. The Rusher is no longer harming himself, he’s harming others who now suffer from this “Second Hand Procrastination”. As second hand smoking is unhealthy second hand procrastination is also harmful to the ones around the procrastinator. It cost them his time, his affections, and it can even have a monetary cost with things as late fees, non refundable tickets going to waste and others. In his professional life The Rusher might even be affecting his coworkers and subordinates, by making them miss important personal activities because of having to rush to finish some task that was waiting on his desk for 2 weeks but now has to be finished by morning. This is one of multitude of reasons why reducing our procrastinating is important. It gives us more clarity, more options, improves the chances of success and might even save a relationship or two.

Has this nudged you to work on your procrastination issues? If so, or even if not, I’d love to read some comments bellow, in the mean time, have an excellent week, and remember that on Sunday it’s Saint Valentine, so better be prepared so you don’t have to cancel it with a work emergency, lack of reservations or whatever other thing you’re putting off.

Categories
Actionable English Procrastination

“Setting your schedule” or “Back to School”

Hello everyone. Today I bring you another tool that will help you take control of your time and therefore be less prone to procrastinate. Remember when you where young (you shone like the sun) no no, really, remember your school days? Remember how you used to get all this things done, at least in the morning? And then, in the afternoons, if you where left to fend for yourselves time slowed down? Maybe you wasted the afternoon watching TV, or some went outside to play. Some might have had extracurricular activities, most didn’t. Try to remember how time seemed to change its pace from morning to afternoon. One reason that might have been was the existence of the school schedule. Give it a thought. In the mornings all of your activities were planned beforehand. You woke up everyday at the same time, had a morning routine and then you went to school. Once in school you had a clear schedule. And it was great. It was great for your productivity, maybe not very fun but you got stuff done. On the other hand, the afternoons were loads of fun, when you could figure out what you wanted to do with them. In the end it mostly turned our to be same old same old, am I right? If your schedule wasn’t prepared by an adult for you had to think of something yourself and that could take some time. Well, we are the adults now. We’ve got to take care of our schedules. And that can be a daunting task. I know that some parts of our day are fixed, most of all the mornings, but that’s only because we tend to get up as late as possible. After the morning rush we are set free to go on with our day. Whether we work a regular job, we are independent, we don’t work or whatever it is that we do with our days we still have the day ahead of us. We still have all this time that has to be filled with, if we do it right, meaningful activities. And that’s where procrastination comes in, because if we don’t figure out, with preparation, what this activities are going to be we can be drawn to other tasks less important and more urgent, or so they seem at the time, or we can end up wasting our time because we haven’t solved the puzzle in our head of what it is we want to do. I recommend then that we schedule our days. Like when we were in school. We can schedule our tasks for every hour of the day. Sounds a little crazy I know, but the bigger procrastinator you are the more help you need. You need to do your schedule at least the day or night before. Mixing your daily routine with the distinct tasks that your have to accomplish that day, giving them even less time than your estimation thus forcing yourself to concentrate harder at them, remember Parkinson’s Law from a couple of posts ago. Remember that every task that you put in there is a commitment to somebody, maybe only to you but a commitment nevertheless.

Schedule

Once you’ve got your schedule for the next day I bet you’ll even sleep better. By doing this you are helping yourselves in two ways. You’ll define what has to be done, and that gets you thinking about the task. You’ll establish if the task is relevant, if it’s meaningful, if it’s feasible, if it’s pertinent, all of this help you choose the task to be done, if it’s the better use of your time right then and there. The second thing you’ll accomplish is the ability to focus and not get distracted. As the tasks have been already chosen, by yourself, your only duty then would be to do them to the best of your abilities, and as fast as possible. No second guessing. No waiting for inspiration or other muses. So my dear reader, do you schedule your day tightly or loosely or not at all? I’d love to hear from you on the comments and if you think this blog is interesting then please share.

Categories
Actionable English Procrastination

Fighting procrastination tips

Hello my readers. Up until now I’ve been talking and talking about many aspects of procrastination, and that’s fun and, well, an excellent way for you to procrastinate by reading about procrastination. Now I’m going to give the very first actionable tip to help you fight procrastination. As we’ve seen before there are many types of procrastinators and different reasons for procrastinating, so we’ll need a set of tools to be effective and efficient. One of the reasons for procrastination is facing distractions. We all have now machines around us that are fighting for our attention, and on top of that we install more apps to let them do this task better. We’ve got social media, games on top of social media, video sites, music sites, blogs like this one but less useful. Just to see how successful this companies are ate getting our attention I’ll give you some information. As of the moment of this writing, the market value of Facebook is 274 billion dollars, that of General Electric is 283 billion dollars, and that of General Motors… 45.5 billion dollars. Can you see that? Distraction is big big business. Now, we all love our Facebook, I’m not saying you should go cold turkey, uninstall the apps and curse your smartphone or computer, that would only be necessary on the most extreme cases. But what I’m going to propose is a two step strategy, two phases that will let you do your work and have fun too. The first step is to eliminate those distractions, and by that I mean all the literal bells and whistles that our apps have turned on by default. They all shout for our attention “Hey, look, someone commented on that post about a lost puppy your friend put up this morning, check it out!” or the more common “You’ve got mail”. Most phones have the “do not disturb” function or at least the one that lets you turn the ringers off. If you’re only on your computer you can shut your email down, close your browser and even turn your speakers off to quiet it down. Do you need more privacy? Shut your door, let the calls go to voicemail, that’s what it’s there for, and do your work.

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We are ready then to work, and that’s awesome. We’ve eliminated distractions and we are prepared, pumped up because we will be able to work. We feel great and maybe we might even have won a little reward, maybe we can get a cup of coffee and… Stop, that’s procrastination too. Here’s where the second part comes in, and it’s the most important. We can see what happened before. We feel happy because we’ve accomplished a prepping task and here comes the pleasure seeking part of our brains claiming it’s reward. We are recognizing some patterns in our behavior. We can use them as triggers to actively change our responses. By first recognizing this pattern we can prepare a different response to it, so we must first do that, recognize them. Some are very easy to spot, they come in the form of “There’s a lot of time left, I’ll do this later” trigger, our response has to change from “yes, drop it” to “you’re trying to get out from doing this, let’s start now” We can frame this in IF THEN statements and be ready for them easily, I’ll give some examples next.

  • IF I catch myself saying “there’s lots of time, maybe later” THEN I’ll tell myself “Maybe, but you can start now so do it now”
  • IF I catch myself saying “I don’t feel like doing this now” THEN I’ll tell myself “You won’t feel like doing it later either, it’s a horrible task, let’s get it over with ASAP”
  • IF I catch myself saying “I need to prepare more” AND I know for a fact that I can’t be more prepared THEN I’ll tell myself “You’re as ready as you’ll ever be, buckle up because we’re doing this”

This mechanical responses can seem simple and silly, but that’s the beauty of it, they work. Try them, write them down on a notebook and check them out, grow your list. You can even write them down on index cards and carry them around with you, like little affirmations this is the software you’re going to use in your head to help you respond to this procrastinating inciting triggers.
If you liked this tips I’d really love to read your comments, you can share with us some of your triggers and responses, we can all learn from each other, so please post some here.

Categories
English Growth Procrastination

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”

Some of you might have recognized the title of this post. Others are reading it for the first time but, after thinking a little, are beginning to agree with it. It’s known as Parkinson’s Law and it’s one of those bits of wisdom that observation of the world brings us. This one’s a big deal for us procrastinators in two very different and seemingly opposite ways. A few posts back I talked about the Student Syndrome and if you remember, how it refers to the tendency people, but mostly students, have to put off work on an assignment until the last possible moment. This tendency helps them, some say, to get fired up about the work, getting adrenaline pumping through their veins, and igniting the passion in them. In the stricter of terms this is correct, although it is very risky because it doesn’t leave any margin of error to cope with another law derived from observation, Murphy’s Law. In spite of all it’s flaws The Student Syndrome does one thing very well, and that is curb Parkinson’s Law. When we only allocate the least amount of time possible to a task then we can’t be afraid of that task taking all of our time. So you’d think this is an apology for procrastination, but it is not, because even though this could be a way for procrastinators to rationalize their ways it is also true that we can limit Parkinson’s Law on our own. Let’s go back to the Law that says that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. It’s a perfectionist’s way of life and most of us can certainly relate to this. While we’ve got time to deliver we won’t stop reviewing, verifying, checking once, twice, thrice and more the work we’ve done. Or we can spend a lot of time previous to starting the work, procrastination 101. We can research again and again, on related topics, on the tools of our trade, on the merchants of said tools, etc. Researching before and reviewing after are not problems on their own, but they are a problem when they get in the way of doing the work. So, what can we do? Well, it’s so easy you will tell me to find a real solution, and that is we can limit the time we allow ourselves to work on the task, that’s it. Do we think it’ll take 4 hours to complete? DeskReadyForWorkWell, then complete it in that much time, after which you’re not allowed to go back to the task under some sort of self imposed penalty. You need to penalize yourself as if you were going over the deadline because if you are lenient you won’t take this seriously. Penalties will only be necessary at first don’t you worry, because you’ll have to limit the time you spend on everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. And here’s my best advice of the day for you. In order to be able to limit the time you set for your activities you’ll first have to know what your activities are, what tasks need be done and which are routine activities you already have or want to adopt. What? You say it seems I’m going to talk about a schedule? Well, you’re right. For the worst procrastinators of us a detailed schedule will be necessary if we want to use our times the best we can. I for one have a terrible memory and if I don’t allocate the hours of the day for my different tasks and habits I might skip something. If you’re comfortable with having it all in your head, you don’t drop any ball, and feel good freestyling it, by all means, be my guest, but if you feel anxious, lose focus and track of time, then you should schedule everything. So, that’s it, Parkinson’s Law can make us lazy crazy and give us the impression of accomplishment when we really wasted lots of time if we ignore it’s existence. When we tame it, we can use it to our advantage and let it work for us, just like we do with the law of gravity. Another tool for your tool belt.

Books mentioned in this post

Parkinson’s Law, and Other Studies in Administration

Categories
Actionable English Procrastination

“Time may change me, but I can’t trace time”

I recently had a chat with a teenager about how she has all this rights, how parents have to see that their kids are happy and they have to procure this happiness by whatever means necessary, even at the expense of their own happiness. I’m not going to elaborate on the talk itself and the substance of it, although there is a lot of material there. I’m going to focus on how, when I was a kid, I felt as entitled as her and I felt the same way, and how I thought I was so right I could never change my mind about this. That was then of course, this is now. I changed and my views and ideas changed from then to now. We all change don’t we? And we use this knowledge as an excuse to do certain things. Being as it is the beginning of a new year what I’ll say is still fresh in our memories, and these are “resolutions”. We all make them for the new year. We make an image of our future self and our future self is way better than our present self. That’s the one who always eats right, always exercises, never looses it’s cool, saves, and starts his work and does its errands with plenty of time to spare. We dream about it, we bet the farm on it, it has all of our dreams and expectations riding on it’s shoulders. That future self is, well, awesome. changesNow, let me ask you, if that’s the case, why isn’t the present self that awesome? It should be, after all, it’s the future self of our past self, is it no? And that past self made all of the mostly same new year resolutions the present self is making and nothing happened, most of the time. So, what’s going on? Well, we like lying to ourselves. We like making excuses. We love rationalizing irrational behavior. We tell ourselves “I’ll feel more like it tomorrow” perfectly knowing we are not going to feel more like it tomorrow, well, maybe the next day then. We do all of this because we procrastinate. Yes, it is my leitmotif if you had been distracted and hadn’t noticed. We procrastinate and make reasons why we do so. In previous posts we’ve talked a little about this. We procrastinate because we are afraid, because we don’t feel like it, because we think we better under pressure, for many reasons, most of them because we think we’ll feel like it later. In some cases this is true. We feel more like working on an assignment rather than partying, watching TV or whatever other activity on the night before we have to turn it in than on the night it was given, this is true. The thing is that not all of the things we procrastinate on are, let’s say it this way, deliverables. We procrastinate also on changing for the better. On making changes that are going to transform us on better people, healthier, wealthier, happier. Here’s the apparent paradox. We act as if we won’t change and as if we are going to change at the same time. The paradox goes away when we realize that we are going to change in a way that, if we don’t do the work, is going to make us worse than we were before, and that if we don’t want that we need to work on it today to prevent this natural decay. So, what will you do, today, to be that awesome future self we all dream about?

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English Mindfulness Procrastination

A quick thought on mindfulness

As this is my first post of 2016 I’d like to thank all of you who have being reading me, it’s a good feeling to be read even if it’s only one person. As you’ve seen by now procrastination is my demon. I’ve lost many things to this demon and thus I’m committed to fighting it and help my fellow procrastinators transform into actors of their own lives, creators of their destinies, masters of their present and future. As we’ve seen so far on other posts, if you haven’t read them do it now, I’ll wait, they’re not that long, it should take you at most 5 minutes, so go, now, yes now. Ok, as I was saying, as we’ve talked before procrastinators are not all the same, and so not one technique will work on all procrastinators, we need many. The same way that we’ve heard the saying that when the only tool you’ve got is a hammer every problem looks like a nail here we need to go beyond a single method to combat procrastination. We can use focus and visualization as we’ve seen before. This tools allow us to have a better grasp on what it its we want to accomplish, our goals. Visualization helps us first by establishing what “done” looks like. We’re not talking here o a single or multiple metrics goal, as would a business KPI, or a timed performance for an athlete, we are talking about a visualization of much more than that. Again, I’m not trying to be esoteric here, I’m very much grounded, but what I’m saying is that a description would require a narrative worthy of a novel, and unless you are or want to be a writer this is not necessary. I’m talking about establishing how we will feel when we’re done, how we will look like when we are done, how our environment will be when we are done. This is a visualization that will help our brains set targets and our actions will then be compared to those targets, we will feel stress building if we are pulling on the wrong direction. So that for visualization, now, for focus. We need to focus our actions to go in the sense of that visualization. We need to set boundaries to our attention so we can achieve our goals. When we don’t set these boundaries what we do can in the worst case destroy work we had already done to achieve our goals. Focus allows us to work, advance, build on the path of our goals. Now, having focus is not easy, we are easily distracted, all the time something is there competing for our attention, be it external like social media or plain old media or be it internal, our own thoughts. We can blame every gadget we own for our lack of attention, but we are, by far, our worst distractor. We are constantly being bombarded by wandering that emerges from the most subtle reference from our senses and mostly from the last wandering thought and build a chain of disperse ideas linked by the most obscure references. And now, here we are, at last, ready to talk about mindfulness. MeditatingInBrugesWhat does it have to do with focus and visualization? Mindfulness is a tool for us to use, a way on which to travel to gain better focus and be better at visualizing. By practicing mindfulness we learn how to be in the moment by stepping in front of our wandering minds and not letting those pesky meandering thoughts catch our attention. Current Internet mythology establishes our thoughts at about 50,000 to 70,000 different ones per day, most would have to come and go and come back some more. Mindfulness trains by constant repetition, and if we are attentive enough we could call it deliberate practice, to keep those thoughts at bay and get a genuine sense of calm, but also it trains us to swiftly bring our focus back when distracted and that’s the most important part. By using this ability we can bring our focus back when we get distracted from our tasks or from our visualizing. Visualization is a difficult exercise because we can be thrown to every other direction by any distinct thought, but realizing this and getting back on track, by bringing the focus back to our visualization, we’ll be able to set our paths to our goals and have a safe journey.

So, have you thought about mindfulness before and are you interested in it? I’d love to read your comments.

Categories
English Growth Mindset Procrastination

Seeing the future.

Hello readers. I won’t count you today because we are on holidays and maybe you are not here, you’re all on vacation somewhere. So, from the title you might enquire that I have gone metha or something. Nothing further from that, except we are going to talk about VISUALIZATION (in upper case for all you skimmers). Again some might ask “What does visualization have got to do with fighting procrastination?” Glad you asked, and the answer is a lot. When you visualize you are bringing attention to something that is not real. You can visualize about anything, and let’s do a quick exercise right now. Please, if you will, close your eyes and visualize your best friend from elementary school and see him or her, then after a little while open our eyes again. Go ahead, do it, I’ll wait right here. Did you do it? Good. Now, think about how hard that was. It wasn’t, was it? And that’s all there is to it really. You can visualize things that are not right there and that are tucked away in your memory. Now, can you visualize non existing things?Visualization Yes you can, just as easily, as long as you don’t try to cram too many details all at once. You have to let your mind build the visualization on the fly. So, you may ask now what does this have to do with procrastination? Good question, and the answer is better. You see, when you visualize you are creating the subject of your visualization. No, I’m not talking about the law of attraction or something like that. What I mean is that the image you are creating in your brain is pretty real, in your brain, so you might as well use it like that. So, for our purpose of procrastination let’s put it to the test. Let’s say you have a pending task that you are dreading, finishing a report for instance, and you need some data for that, and the only person who can give your this data is someone you can’t really stand. I can see it right now, you are dreading doing the report because you are dreading getting the data. You procrastinate, and then some more. Making matters worse you know you are procrastinating, which makes you anxious, and then more anxiety comes from you imagining the dreadful encounter. You are visualizing the encounter and materializing in your brain over and over and over and you get the point, right? No? Let me explain. By postponing the dreadful task you are suffering much more than by executing the dreadful task, how crazy is that? Now that we know a little bit what is happening we can do something about it. The first option is the “band aid method” that it minimizes the suffering by going at it fast and in one single motion. That’s the best option if the fear is not paralyzing. The second option is the “Nike method” and “just do it”, similar to the first but here the speed is not in the process but in going at it as soon as you know you have to do something unpleasant, go get it done and relax after that, you’re done. Again, pretty good advice, minimizes suffering by not allowing you to suffer except for the task itself. This two advices are pretty good, when you’re not paralyzed by fear. The last advice is a little more complicated and here is where visualization comes in. You are paralyzed by fear, you are dreading the task as much as a condemned man dreads the gallows. What you can do is start visualizing what it will be like after you’ve done what you dread, how it’s all OK now and how much better it is now that you’ve done this. Visualize it again and again. Even if you know this is pretty unlikely, visualize it, you won’t “make it happen” but your brain will be better prepared for it, and your fear will subside. When your fear subsides enough that you can move then you can “Nike” it and “band-aid” it and then you’ll be done. This has helped me recently on number of occasions when I needed it. I hope you can benefit from this little technique, if so, or not, leave a comment and tell me what has helped you fight your procrastination when you dread the task so much you’d rather book an appointment with the dentist.

Categories
English Growth Procrastination

What kind of procrastinator are you?

Hello my triad. Read the title of this week’s post again. Right, now, you might say “hey, wait a minute, I am not a procrastinator” to what I’d have to answer “Baloney”. If you are not then I need to CAPTCHA this site and fend off machine readers because, if you’re human, you’re a procrastinator. So, we’ll talk about different kinds of procrastinators and you’ll be able to identify yourself. It’ll be a fun experience in self exploration, you’ll see. I’m in no way saying this classification is final, if you google “different kinds of procrastinator” which I did, Google’s a procrastinator’s best friend, you find that there are many posts like this one, some even better, and that they don’t have the same numbers. So I’m going to use a simple one, and then on future posts we’ll be able to elaborate. The simplest classification would be a couple, but that’s not going to cut it this time, so we’ll go with a triad, hey, just as many as my readers, maybe there one of each in here. So, the three types of procrastinators very different amongst them, the reason they procrastinate is not the same and the things they procrastinate on are not the same either.Napping The first one we can remember, and that’s the person who suffers from the “student’s syndrome” and is proud of it. We’ve all been students here, some for a longer time others not that long ago but we’ve all been there and done that. The majority of students tend to put off work to the last possible moment, for instance, if an essay is given now, just before the new year’s break, and it’s due on, let’s say the third week of February you’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery than having half of the class start the work on the week that they come back from the break. “What’s the rush” they might say, “I need to do more research” might be another “reason” that’s a rationalization and not a reason. But hey, let’s be fair, not only students suffer from this, if that was the case then they wouldn’t be so long lines and online jams on tax return season, or other mandatory tasks that governments and organizations make us do. And most of them are easy to do, but yet they’re put off to the last minute. So, why do we do this to ourselves? Well, some research combines two reasons. Our lack of vision and our like of cortisol and adrenaline. Our lack of vision makes us think that a certain task will take less time and will not be plagued by interruptions and accidents. When we estimate the time a task will take to be finished we remember how much a similar task took. The problem is our memory isn’t flawless and we tend to make good things bigger and minimize bad things. This is nice and leads to a healthier life, but it’s awful as a measuring stick to do a benchmark on. Compound that with the fact that we also tend to forget that Murphy exists, and all hell breaks loose. Now we have less time to do our task, we must decide how to do “the impossible” and that’s where the second reason kicks in. With the stress we caused our bodies and the fear that’s starting to materialize the hormones start rushing on our system. We feel cortisol but also adrenaline levels rise and we get a rush out of it. We feel that rush and we work nonstop to finish the assignment, the project, a report. Lucky for most we can turn in a good enough work, and we feel happy about our heroics, but we know it wasn’t our best effort, but hey, under the circumstances, in the end, we pulled it off on such a short amount of time. We put ourselves into an ego boosting trip. If the work is good then we are ecstatic for the amazing job we did, if the work is not good enough we find tons of excuses of why that was, most of them have to do with not having enough time or being hit by Murphy when we know it was us who decided to start working much later. There you have it. The first kind of procrastinator, the student. I know I behave like this sometimes, much less now than when I was an actual student. Do you remember when you acted like this? Leave a comment if you’d like to share with us.